


You Are Forgiven

by pedalpusher



Series: The Day I Can Control Myself [2]
Category: Music RPF, Rock Music RPF, The Who (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Time, Historical Accuracy, Hotel Sex, Implied John/Keith if you squint, Injured Bandmates, M/M, Pete is a drunk bastard, Resolved Sexual Tension, Roger loves him anyway, Who-Typical General Insanity, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 10:49:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19333048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedalpusher/pseuds/pedalpusher
Summary: Are the problems that screw me up really down to him or me?-The Who, "However Much I Booze"





	1. Chapter 1

_Surrey, England_

_October 24, 1973_

 

When Pete finally arrives at the studio, well into the brisk October evening, he bursts through like a storm cloud given human form, gaunt under the dull glare of the overhead lights. There are tapes secured under his arm, and bags under his eyes.

Roger watches him saunter through the doorway. He can tell from the brazen swing in his step and dead-eyed glower that Pete is running on his typical cocktail of brandy and exhaustion. It’s a dangerously flammable mix.

Roger is none too pleased himself, having wasted enough of their slim rehearsal time indulging the film crew dispatched by the label. They’ve a tour looming on the nascent _Quadrophenia_ , and the MCA promo people buzz around them like flies on a carcass. Useless media parasites.

He’s aware that he’s pacing as Pete approaches, that John and an unusually somber Keith are regarding them both like live explosives, trading silent glimpses between one another, telepathically formulating an escape plan. The roadies scramble to clear a path, conscious that the presence of cameras alone is enough to set off their temperamental employers. Pete shoulders past them with hardly a word.

Pete doesn’t acknowledge the band, either, as he goes to hand off the masters, working with Pridden at the sound board for several more agonizing minutes, cueing up tapes. By the time he’s stalked back to the stage, guitar slung over his shoulder and prepared for launch, they’re five hours behind schedule. Roger has been warmed up since the afternoon. The sight of the bumbling film crew, barely unpacked and chatting casually amongst themselves, grinds his last nerve into dust.

“Oi!” Roger shouts, to the coordinated swivel of a bunch of dumbfounded faces. “We’ll be getting on with it, then. This isn’t easy for me to sing. I won’t do it twice, and I won’t wear my voice out waiting for you lot to get the cameras rolling.”

The ultimatum is like an incantation, summoning Pete to him in a furious whirlwind. He looms over Roger, a coiled predator ready to spring.

“I’ve been up for two days working on those backing tapes,” he snarls, too close to Roger’s face. Roger can smell the drink on his breath. “You’ll do as you’re _fucking_ told.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” groans Keith, slumping over a snare with his face in his hands. Off by the sound board, Pridden motions frantically for the group of roadies that have made themselves scarce behind the cases. John has removed his bass and is easing into Pete’s orbit, a practiced maneuver, calculating the ideal opportunity to haul him away.

“You’re drunk,” accuses Roger, refusing to dignify Pete’s posturing with so much as a flinch. The four of them can’t work like this, not with Pete nearly toppling over and a swarm of label lackeys mucking about. “I’ve had enough of this, and I’m leaving. We can come back to it when you’ve slept it off.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” threatens Pete.

“Is that right,” Roger says, tinged by a sneer. “Watch me.”

He turns, and Pete’s hand grasps his wrist in a vise, wrenching him back around. The roadies pour out from backstage and swarm them, holding Roger back with arms braced pre-emptively across his chest, pulling him a safe distance apart from Pete. John has Pete’s shoulders clasped in his hands, is mumbling something hastily reassuring to their frothing guitarist.

Roger has no intention of retaliating, had sworn himself against that option long ago, but the memory of old wounds is enough to organize their entire audience into defensive strategy. Pete has escalated into taunting and sneering. It’s mostly inelegant, curse-laden threats, his usual quick wit eroded by brandy and sleepless nights. Roger almost feels sorry for him.

“Let me go, and let the little fucking cunt go,” Pete mutters darkly, his fists clenched to white around the neck of his guitar, as though it were a serviceable enough substitute for Roger’s neck.

John, exasperated, throws his hands up. Keith is shielded behind the fortress of his drumkit, but Roger glances at him and sees he is poised to leap right over it and into the fray should duty call.

 _Little fucking cunt_. Indignant rage coats the edges of Roger’s vision, a fine red mist, and he rides it out, breathes through the vestigial impulse to lunge. Roughly, he shrugs the roadies off him, and angles himself away from Pete’s bloodthirsty glare, making for the door.

He doesn’t get far before an object whizzes past his ear and a weight clips his shoulder, stinging and nearly bowling him over. Whirling back around, animal instincts alight, he sees Pete clutching the guitar just under the headstock and following through on a swing. Any closer, and the ten-kilo Les Paul would have been as good as an executioner’s axe.

He meets Pete’s eyes for a harrowing moment and they are glazed over, vacant, in what Roger reads as a demonic perversion of his freewheeling stage-trance. Possessed by his own anger and reeling drunk, Pete drops the weapon and charges before John can get his arms back around to restrain him.

He is clumsy and unbalanced, and Roger dodges the oncoming swing easily. With a madman at close range, however, he has no choice but to break the group’s longstanding truce and act in self-defense. When Pete comes at him again, Roger’s answering uppercut collides perfectly with his jaw. It knocks him up and off his feet and instantly unconscious, and then backwards like a dead weight, the back of his head cracking on the stage floor. The sight might even be funny, in a perverse sort of way, if watching Pete go down like a poleaxed cartoon character did not flood Roger with instant and ice-cold terror.

As with all their affairs, the band are gravitationally inclined to spectacle. The MCA crew has finally got the damn cameras rolling to oblige.

John looks on in mute shock. Roger scrambles down to his hands and knees, hobbled by an intensity of regret beyond comprehension, a bolt of mortal fear straight through his chest. He is distantly aware of himself shouting for help, of his hands cradling Pete’s shoulders, Keith descending from the kit and kneeling by his side.

“Pete, Pete,” Keith whimpers, a high thread of panic in his voice that Roger recognizes as dreadfully genuine. “Pete, I swear it, if you get up, we’ll do everything you say from now on.”

Roger envisions the dark laminate of the stage under his knees ripping open, a gaping black hole swallowing him up.

When the ambulance arrives, blue emergency beacons flickering through the windows and up the walls of the studio, he has a sense of being outside himself entirely, watching dizzily from the sidelines like a boxer left bloodied after one too many rounds. There is a detached absurdity to watching the paramedics lift the inimitable Pete Townshend, sprawled and limp and horribly silent, on to a gurney. Bob Pridden has abandoned his desk at the side of the stage and is recounting the whole event to one of the emergency personnel, while John and Keith stand guard with their arms crossed, observing Roger as much as their fallen bandmate, a pair of jaded veterans of the ongoing war that is life in the Horrible Who.

Roger trails the paramedics as they carry Pete out into the cold, his breath coming out in foggy bursts, wringing his hands while they hoist him into the back of the vehicle. He follows them as they all clamber in and is grateful when they permit him to do so.

They turn the siren on, and that’s what does it. Roger sits crumpled by Pete’s side as they barrel down the streets, clutching his hand, consumed with guilt, weeping with the kind of unselfconscious abandon one typically reserves for funerals. The ambulance crew tries to reassure him, but Roger goes on crying until they all give up and politely avert their eyes.

In hospital, the staff is forced to swat him away, and he wears ruts in the emergency department linoleum for half an hour, periodically fielding phone calls from their associates back at the studio. When he finally gets hold of Bill Curbishley, their tour manager is his grimly unflappable self, stone-voiced on the other end of the line, as though their guitarist’s sudden hospitalization were an inconvenience on par with a stalled tour bus. His optimistic resolve is why they had hired him; one needed a temperament of steel to last any length of time with the band. He’s of small comfort to Roger, who frets at the reception desk, arms crossed with the receiver jammed against his shoulder, trying to ignore the furtive glances from curious strangers.

In the background, he can hear Keith clamoring to be let on. Curbishley relents and hands the telephone off, and Roger feels the tug of a limp smile at the sound of their drummer’s voice, all tinny on the other end.

“Roger, ol’ love, how is he?”

“Stable, I’m told,” says Roger, feebly. “But they won’t let me see him just yet—”

“Useless bastards! John and I can come over there ourselves, have a word or two.”

“—No, no. Keith, it’s fine. They’re taking good care of him.”

“And I know you’ll look after him just as well.”

It seems an unusual bit of consolation, given their history. Roger swallows down the lump in his throat. There had been a time not too long ago when Keith would not have felt so charitable, when he himself had been on the receiving end of Roger’s temper.

“You must hate me,” Roger says, with his eyes squeezed shut. Keith brays at him dismissively, and comically as he can muster, all things considered.

“I saw the whole thing. Would have done the same, if I was you.”

It’s blatantly a lie. Roger knows Keith would have sooner rolled over and died, allowed himself to be beaten to a pulp with the business end of a Gibson, than retaliate against his beloved Pete Townshend. Pete had that polarizing type of effect on people, the capacity to evoke pure antipathy or slavish devotion. In Roger’s case, maybe a bit of both.

All he knows is that he would rather be the one in Pete’s position right now. It would have been better to let Pete lay into him and to have taken it. It wouldn’t have killed him. This feeling very well might.

A nurse emerges from down the corridor and motions to him. Roger’s heart leaps out of his chest, and he has to stop himself from slamming the phone down on the cradle and sprinting after her.

“Call you back,” Roger blurts, dropping the receiver with a clatter, Keith sputtering some urgent protest. He trots down the hall at a pace that threatens to break into a run, is led down what seems a labyrinthine path designed to torment him, until he is presented at last with a hospital room that he is permitted to enter.

Inside, sat upright on a hospital bed on top of the blankets, a dazed but conscious Pete has him fixed in a bizarrely affectionate glare. The nurse departs with a wry smile.

“Roger!” Pete snaps, and the smirk that creeps on to his face sticks somewhere between smug and sheepish. “You old sap. You sentimental _fucking_ cunt. You soppy little—”

Roger has scarcely been happier to hear Pete running his mouth again, never mind its injection of insults, and shuts him up by crossing straight to the bedside and throwing his arms around him.

“All right, all right! I’m all right, Rog’, lighten up, if you please.” Pete, regardless, makes no attempt to foist Roger off him. “You’re crushing the air out me lungs.”

Roger releases him, cups his hands round his face, then frantically examines the back of his head, the IV slid into his arm. “You are, you’re all right. But what are they giving you, why have they got you hooked up? What’s going on with all this?”

“It’s fluids, mate,” says Pete, equal parts stunned and amused by the fuss. “Roger, it’s saline. I’m dehydrated, is all.”

“Thank god,” says Roger, breathlessly. “Christ, I thought I’d killed you. Pete, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I wish you knew.”

Pete interrupts him with a scoff. “Don’t flatter yourself. When I remember what I was so angry about we can have a fair go of things. Like they did in the old days, how about it? Ten paces and a pistol. A rematch, if you would.”

Roger would very much rather not, and his heart sinks a little. “You don’t remember what happened?”

“No, though I must have been stark raving to risk having a go at you, eh? That much I do recall. They’re forcing me to stick around for a little while longer. Better hope you haven’t punched the staggering talent out of me.”

“I wish I’d punched your mouth off you.”

Pete jabs him in the ribs, playfully. Roger smiles, shaky, despite the lingering image etched into his eyeballs of Pete falling, and the sickening sound of his head knocking against the stage floor. Roger can’t be angry with him, not even for the attempt on his life. In a sense, it wasn’t really Pete swinging the guitar at his head. It was something else—the same evil catalyst, he assumes, that drove the man to down half a bottle of brandy in advance of a breakneck tour rehearsal. Whatever these demons are, they’re well beyond his powers to exorcise. Pete doesn’t let anyone get that close. Not even the band.

He can’t recall when the drinking progressed from post-show celebrations and studio nightcaps to a daily occurrence, but it has taken root like a weed, and Roger worries quietly in scattered moments, because to publicly lament such things in their line of work is akin to swearing in church. If Pete’s got a problem, so do half their peers.

And so, infused with varying quantities of brandy on any given evening, Pete hurtles back and forth between the bright and quick-witted philosopher Roger admires so much and a guitar-swinging monster with empty black pits for eyes. Some days, every shade in between. Roger never seems to know which Pete he’s going to get.

The one before him now appears to have had his brains rattled into a strangely forgiving and reflective sort of mood, which has Roger relieved, but also a little wary.

“I probably deserved it,” Pete suggests, but the attempt at humor lands with a thud. Roger decides now is not the time to relay the details, and retreats to a chair at the corner of the hospital room, sagging down with his chin in his hands.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says helplessly.

“What do you mean, you don’t know what to do? You don’t have to _do_ anything. They’ll inspect and poke at me for another few hours and send me off with what I hope are very excellent drugs, and then it’s back to business. Show must go on and all that.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Roger sighs. “It feels like we’re at each other’s throats.”

“We’ve always been that way,” Pete reminds him, as if he were being purposefully stupid.

“It’s worse now.”

“It gets worse, and then it gets better again. That’s just how it is with us. You know that.”

“Maybe I don’t want the part where it gets worse.”

Pete leers at him as though there are grievous implications within the statement that Roger has failed to understand. The space between them might as well be a thousand miles. If they’re not right up against each other, within striking distance or rebounding off hips and ribcages in their awkward, heated stage ritual, they are oceans apart. There is no middle ground, no neutral territory. It is exhausting.

“Come back ‘ere,” says Pete finally.

Roger obeys suspiciously. Gently, Pete lifts Roger’s right hand for inspection, where a faint bruise is emerging at the point of impact, and to Roger’s chagrin the brushing of Pete’s hand on his own unearths a twinge of old sentiments.

Pete looks devilish, conspiratorial. “Heard you held my hand the whole way here.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Roger grumbles. “And cried like a girl. I suppose I’ll never stop hearing about it.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Serves me right, then.”

“You were _scared_. About me.”

“’Course I fucking was, I was bloody terrified!”

“Can’t stand me, can’t properly finish me off.”

“ _Pete_.”

Pete breathes a wry concession of a laugh. “But you got me good,” he says, thumb grazing over Roger’s knuckles, observing the faint souvenir from this most terrible row of theirs. “I’ll bet that’s consolation enough. One of these days. One of these days, Roger, I’ll get inside that bitter mind of yours.”

Roger isn’t totally sure what he means by that, but nonetheless he fears that Pete _will_ one day worm his way into his head—or at least more than he has already—and that what he uncovers will unravel them both. He swallows when Pete looks back up at him, ignoring the sudden and persistent conviction that the walls are closing in.

“I should call the boys,” Roger says, clearing his throat through the crack in his voice, and pulling his hand back, nervously rubbing as if to scrub Pete’s confounding tenderness off him. “They’ll be wanting to hear the news. I think they might have feared the worst. Moony especially.”

“And Karen?”

“Bill spoke to her. She’s on her way with the kids. All the more reason for me to go back, now that I know you’re all right."

Pete paws mournfully at his jaw. “She might congratulate you on your aim, actually.”

“Or resent me for beating her to the punch. So to speak.”

“Touché,” Pete mutters. He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. “God, why is it so fucking bright in here? You won’t really leave, will you. I think you owe me for nearly killing me. Stay until Karen gets here. What if I’m brain damaged. What if I need surgery, what if they have to cut my head open—"

Pete draws a finger around the top of his skull, crossing his eyes for effect.

Roger snorts, but a pang of guilt strikes him anyway. “And I thought Keith was the dramatist.”

Pete grasps for Roger’s hand again, pleading.

The stark hospital lighting is painful even for Roger, makes him feel like he’s been thrown under flood lamps, caught red-handed. He’s itching to get out of here, go sulk out in the cold and dark and damp of the streets as would be more befitting of his vampiric bandmate. Perhaps they’re more alike than either of them had presumed.

But there is that irresistible lure in Pete’s eye, the draw of being wanted in spite of the constant fallout, and the ease with which forgiveness is so freely offered him now. It’s a far cry from where they were years ago, walking on eggshells. They have, in spite of their own best efforts to the contrary, sustained their tense companionship.

“All right,” Roger says at last. “But I need to call everyone back at Shepperton, straightaway, let them know you’re alive and well. And I’m picking myself up whatever sorry excuse they’ve got for coffee downstairs.”

Pete sighs with relief. “I’m sure it’s piss. Raw sewage. Bring me some, too, won’t you?”

“Mostly milk, mostly sugar?”

“Bless you.”

Roger turns for the door. Hand on the knob, pausing in contemplation, he remarks to Pete offhandedly: “They didn’t get it, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“The sodding camera crew! Not a second’s worth of footage. They were so eager to film us having a go at each other that they forgot to put the tape in.” Now Roger can’t help but laugh at the irony. “Bill told me. A day wasted, and not even a record for the history books.”

“You just wanted your superior boxing skills immortalized,” grouses Pete.

“No, on the contrary.” Roger looks over at him with a wistful sadness. Pete’s shoulders are wilting in contrition, that haunted shadow on his face that darkens him more and more often these days. “We could even pretend it never happened.”

Pete says nothing. They regard each other until the weight of it becomes too difficult to bear and Roger feels himself catching alight from this indignant, contrarian strain of love that only Pete wrings out of him. It is a terribly insistent feeling that he is condemned to suffer, and still he holds it dear. The difficulty of his fondness for Pete makes it tortuous and addicting.

He departs with the little fire of Pete’s eyes at his back, Pete with his permanent intensity of expression and the infuriating, self-assured silence of knowing that Roger will soon return.

He always does.


	2. Chapter 2

_San Francisco, California_

_November 20-21, 1973_

 

It is a feat demanding supernatural effort, and the administration of chemical support, that Roger is able to lay still on the hotel bedspread, feet crossed at the ankle, fingers laced around the glass of wine balanced on his stomach. He gazes, preoccupied, at the murmuring television. A local news channel is blathering about a car theft, the details lost to the double-speed tape reel that is his brain. He is consumed by a near mortal anxiety that he is determined to quell, and judging by the wine bottle perched on the dresser, he estimates he is about three-quarters of the way there.

Sometime tomorrow morning, this same channel may recount the story of The Who’s opening show for their North American tour at the Cow Palace, in which their firecracker of a drummer had tranquilized himself face-first into a snare drum.

They’d even managed a few more entries down the set list with a resourcefully enlisted member of the audience—and the poor kid was competent, if no Keith Moon—but by then all the air had been sucked out of the proceedings, and they’d retreated with their tail between their legs, beseeching the San Francisco Bay with promises of a rescheduled performance. It had become clear, in spite of the grim humor with which the situation had been handled on stage, that Keith’s incapacitation had not been an exaggerated bout of play-acting but a near-lethal dose of sedative. Fistfuls, as he has been prone to taking as of late. Larger and more enthusiastic ones since Kim has left him.

Keith is in hospital now, drifting in and out of consciousness, and the band, frightened and humiliated, is sweeping up the pieces of the evening.

Smashed hotel rooms and crumpled Bentleys are one thing, but Roger is growing awfully weary of the sight of blacked out bandmates and what seems an unconscionable array of near-death experiences for a simple rock band, the unending trail of destruction in their wake. This was supposed to be a good time, after all.

But The Who were never quite so simple.

He stares at the phone at the bedside. Its silence is deafening, and the prattling of the television makes his head hurt. They have a day’s break before they’re scheduled for the next stop on the tour, but their management is juggling potential cancellations, should Keith’s condition fail to improve.

There’s a knock at the door to interrupt his ruminations. He bolts upright, nearly spilling pinot noir all over himself, and hurries to unlatch it without even a cursory glance through the peephole. Amateur move, given that they’ve reached the point of booking rooms under pseudonyms. Fortunately, it’s Pete standing before him in the hallway, empty glass in hand like a talisman.

Roger’s a little surprised to see him, since Pete had been the one to suggest they all retire for the evening. Nothing to be done, after all, except wring their hands and wait.

“Don’t panic,” Pete instructs him. “No change in prognosis as of yet, I’ve just run out of brandy and as it turns out my misery is in desperate need of company.”

Roger nods wordlessly, standing aside to let him in. Pete moves languidly for the wine bottle, pouring the remainder into the glass, and takes a surprisingly restrained sip.

“I see you’ve made a good enough dent on your own,” he says.

Roger shrugs. “That kind of night.”

“I’ll say.”

Pete goes to slump down at the edge of the bed, giving the news program a hollow-eyed appraisal before switching it off. Roger joins him. Ordinarily this proximity would be a playful provocation at best, and dangerous at worst, but circumstances being what they are, dancing around their convoluted boundaries seems beside the point.

Private grief is a rare thread of unhindered communication. They have always struggled to understand one another, but Roger feels this shared pain like a lash binding them together.

“He’ll be all right,” Roger says, as much to convince himself as to reassure Pete. Pete looks back at him, a softness evident through the mask of exhaustion and drunken armor. It seems he would do anything to render himself impenetrable, but the internal state of affairs slips through from time to time. Pete is guarding a burden more than any one man ought to bear, technically the livelihood of all four of them, and maybe it’s why he drinks so much, is pre-emptively brutal and yet astonishingly fragile underneath.

It’s embarrassing that it takes these episodes of violence and almost-tragedy to get Roger to realize, with awful poignancy, just how habitually unfair they are to one another. It’s stupid, so utterly and numbingly stupid.

“Can I ask you something?” Pete says. The naked innocence of that request makes Roger’s heart stop.

“What’s that?”

“When you came to tell me that Keith was done, that he was really out. There was this look in your eyes, something I don’t think I’d ever noticed, but it must have been there before. Maybe it’s been there between you and me, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to see it.” Pete pauses, drawing a strategic breath, like he’s struggling to convert the complexity of the thought to language, and Roger swallows hard. “I used to think you were just hotheaded, angry at all of us for these reasons I couldn’t comprehend, for what you saw as us letting you down, I suppose. But this was the worst of it. He did let you down, all of us, and you weren’t even angry. You had this expression like you’d already forgiven him.”

What else could he have done? Roger sighs. The way Pete is looking at him makes his hands tremble on his knees.

“Yes. I had.”

Pete angles toward him fully, glance drifting upward as if calculating, wrestling with the implications of a decision, and then leaning forward in a perilous closure of distance.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, then,” he implores, and with his free hand pulls Roger’s face to his, and kisses him.

Roger expects a sensation like a stab wound in his chest, cruel twist of a knife he’s too stunned to pull out. It’s how he’d always felt Pete’s closeness, after all—like a sharp edge, the potential onslaught of fists or axe-blade guitars. And this seems like it ought to be a lethal outcome, a point thrust deep into the softest parts of him. He is surprised, instead, to find fear blooming into relief, surges of panic ebbing into the steady swell of desire, an uncomplicated lust buoyed by wine and at last allowed to race forth after years of methodical denial.

Pete pulls away, eyes flickering nervously, just as Roger feels himself overcoming his own shock, and in its place the impetus to tackle Pete down to the mattress. Pete scrambles through a drunken stream of apologies, though his hand lingers on Roger’s face. He looks paralyzed, terrified and yet giddily entertained by his own audacity.

“I’m not—I didn’t mean—you should probably hit me for that one, really.” Pete stammers a laugh. “I wouldn’t blame you. I’d—”

Roger doesn’t hit him, but he does pick up where they left off rather forcefully. He kisses Pete so hard he nearly breaks his nose. The wine glass is knocked to the floor, its contents staining the carpet, though neither of them take much notice.

Pete makes a sound of surprise that spills into Roger’s mouth, and Roger swears it’s the sweetest bit of music the man has ever made. They fall inevitably backward onto the bed, Pete steering Roger underneath him and pulling hurriedly at his belt, and in this scenario Roger finds himself unusually eager to yield to a bid for control. With things unfolding the way they are, Pete’s already won, anyway.

It’s frantic enough business that clothes come only halfway off at first, yanked upward or downward at odd angles, interrupted by the discovery that after ten years’ worth of wanting to strangle one another, kissing each other breathless seems the more satisfying option. Eventually, Pete gets Roger’s shirt over his head and a hand down his trousers, which seems a bit unfair considering Pete is still mostly fully dressed but for a raked-up hem and an unbuttoned fly—Roger had gotten that far, at least—but when Pete finally has his hand around him, Roger has to throw his head back with his eyes screwed shut to stop from crying out.

Pete takes advantage of that, too, leaning to bury his face into the junction of Roger’s neck and shoulder while he pulls at him in long, agonizing strokes, slow and taunting like he’s trying to force some kind of formal surrender, like Roger being thrown back beneath him with his cock in Pete’s hand isn’t victory enough.

He acquiesces, gives up a low sound from deep in his throat and knots a hand in Pete’s hair, and that might have been the desired outcome, because Pete pauses abruptly to prop himself up on one arm, stare down at the sight of Roger under him in a manner that could be wonderment.

“Jesus, fuck,” protests Roger, breathlessly. “Why are you stopping?”

“I just wanted,” says Pete, his own chest heaving, and trails off there. “I just wanted—…”

Pete is rarely at a loss for words, and Roger decides he’ll take some pride in that. He’s not arguing with the sight over him, either; Pete with tufts of hair askew, mouth damp and red, straining impression in the leg of his jeans.

“Yeah,” Roger says, lovingly even. “I know.”

He pulls Pete back down to him by the collar of his shirt. Kisses him again, ravenously, like he’ll never get enough, tasting the dark sweetness of brandy and red wine, until Pete’s breath is coming in ragged gasps and he is bucking against him, until they’re both threatening to come apart, and Pete’s deliriously tearing the trousers down Roger’s hips.

Once the momentum picks up, it turns out that fucking your friend and bandmate for the first time is strangely intuitive, even for Roger, who is unaccustomed to the concept but pleasantly eager for the novelty of callouses and hard angles, of Pete locking eyes with his while he pumps his fist over Roger’s cock again, gratifyingly faster this time.

And Roger relishes the falter in Pete’s wrist when he finally musters the wherewithal to return the favor, the brief fluttering of eyelashes, roll of hips, the whites of eyes tipping back. They’re working each other in complementary rhythm, perhaps the only occasion short of the stage where the two of them might be considered in perfect harmony.

Pete comes first, prefaced by collapsing exhortations for Roger to go on _faster_ and _come on then_ and _please_ , and it’s the “please” part coupled with the warmth of Pete spilling over his stomach that causes Roger to quickly follow suit. He groans a desperate release as Pete crumples over him, undeterred by the mess and sweat that plasters them together. Roger doesn’t mind it, either, his leg hooked over the back of Pete’s knee.

He feels Pete’s breath gusting in his hair, against the side of his face, is acutely aware of every point where skin touches skin, and is struck shortly thereafter by the unearthly realization that this has indeed just happened, that they have gotten each other off in Roger’s hotel room. He stares at the cracks in the ceiling, illuminated by the amber wash of the single bedside lamp. Pete finds a way to affix himself more comfortably to Roger’s neck and the rise of his chest, and Roger’s hand drifts instinctively to the back of his head to hold him there. His other one is still crushed between them, wedged against hipbones and starting to fall asleep. He doesn’t dare move it.

Pete mumbles something against his collarbone. Roger turns his head so that his cheek is resting on Pete’s temple.

“What’s that?”

“I said,” Pete clarifies, with a twinge of self-satisfied bravado, and raising himself up so that he may more clearly parrot Roger’s ancient and very recently broken promise back at him, “’ _It won’t be me_.’”

Roger sticks his open palm in Pete’s face, shoves him away with a perfunctory eyeroll. “You started it.”

“I started it and you finished it. Spectacularly, I might add.”

Roger beams at him. “Oh, I always do.”

Pete sags down again, buries his face back into Roger’s throat and unleashes a noise of mock aggravation. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I.”

“Strolled straight on through.”

“I think I prefer this to you punching my lights out, though. I’m sure I‘d risked it.”

“Less than you might think,” Roger admits, which is a little easier to do when Pete’s folded over him like this, when all that he’s hoped for and simultaneously dreaded since his school days has come crashing down, literally, on top of him.

“Shower?” says Pete.

“After you,” Roger concedes.

Pete rolls off him and pads nonchalantly to the bathroom, shedding what remains of his clothing along the way, and throws an indecipherable glance over his shoulder before he closes the door behind him. Roger feels the sudden chill of the air like a gale force wind.

He watches the movement of Pete’s shadow over the strip of light at the bottom of the door frame. Listens intently to the sound of the water blasting from the showerhead, and imagines Pete’s movements beneath it. He fails to scrounge up the will to move, his mind scoured blank and his energy pleasantly sapped. In vain, he also tries to summon some measure of concern, regret or mortal terror. What has happened here is irreversible. Odd that the knowledge of that should be deeply satisfying in its way.

He wants Pete to stay. It’s a terrible idea, but the thought takes an inexorable hold over him. Pete’s impulse will be to run, slink off with the belated discovery that this whole escapade has created new wounds that need licking. Roger may very well have laid him flat again, albeit by a different means this time around.

The shower cuts off and the faucet comes on. Pete opens the door, silhouetted against the bathroom light and a haze of steam, Roger’s toothbrush at an angle in his mouth.

Roger wrinkles his nose, pretends to be affronted. “Really?”

Pete pulls the toothbrush out to lecture him with it. “I believe you and I have transgressed far more significant boundaries at this point.”

“Fair enough.”

Roger regards him with lazy contentment, reclined on the bed with his jeans partly undone. He’s seen Pete exactly like this before, in dressing rooms and tour buses, but the suggestive line of the towel slung around his hips implies something else entirely now. The image is distinctly erotic, post-coital. Roger is unsure he’ll ever be able to see him like this any other way.

He commits the sight to memory. Pete, who was probably never anyone’s textbook definition of handsome, looks positively lovely to Roger. Like a painting, a piece of modern art.

“Stay with me,” Roger tells him, voice accidentally husky. “You owe me one.”

Pete leans over to spit in the sink, and turns back to him with a look of thinly mustered incredulity. Still, he quavers a fraction when he speaks. Roger has to quash a smile at that.

“I _owe_ you? Been running a tab, have we?”

“The hospital. Shepperton. I stayed with you when you asked.”

“Then we’re back to that subject, I see. Is this to say I’ve managed an equivalent feat to knocking you unconscious?”

“Feels that way.”

That provokes a bladed smile, and Pete wanders back over to the edge of the bed, looking down at him with his arms crossed.

“What are you doing?” says Roger.

“Thought I’d give myself a moment to bask in my success, in that case,” Pete says. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you both shirtless _and_ horizontal.”

Roger reaches over and launches a pillow at him. Pete catches it, goofily triumphant.

“Have it your way, then,” he says, after a long pause, eyes pinched at the corners like he’s guarding a secret. “I’ll stay a while.”

Roger swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands in front of him, fixes himself with a meaningful look that suggests he intends to hold Pete to it. Their eyes meet, and then Pete’s gaze slips down to where the evidence of the night’s events is drying on Roger’s stomach.

The atmosphere of the room is still heavy and sticky-sweet, remnants of steam and sex and anesthetizing quantities of booze. Pete is so close Roger can smell the mass market hotel brand soap wafting off him. He likes the way Pete’s hair curls at the base of his neck when it’s wet.

He slinks off into the bathroom before the night’s momentum can tip their standoff into yet another bout of frenzied clawing, which Roger can admit that he desperately wants but also suspects might be overkill, even for them, even after years of trying to stamp out the flames and the joyful discovery of just how useless it’s all been in the end. Pete watches him go, all wily and wild-eyed, skin gleaming damp in the lamp light.

Roger clicks the door shut behind him and swipes at the condensation on the mirror, stares back at his own disheveled reflection. This is where he is now: leaned over a hotel sink in a coastal American city, his precious rock ‘n’ roll band hot on the heels of disaster. He has just fucked their guitarist out of drunken adrenaline and the explosive force of their ancient, pent-up tension. The magnitude of this, its inherent ridiculousness, is so difficult to grasp that he assumes it’s why he hasn’t freaked out yet, is not huddled on the tile with his face in his knees, screaming.

He turns on the shower and lets the blistering hail of hot water sear away the thought of their drummer laid up in a hospital bed, and what Moony would think of all this, if he knew. That consideration provokes a grim sort of laugh, because if anyone might have figured them out already and consummately failed to care—well, of course it would be Keith. And Roger sees the way Keith looks at John, anyway.

As for Heather, she and Roger have always had an agreement of sorts, his wife being well acquainted with life on the road and hardly naïve as to what rock bands got up to in managing the long, lonely, exhausting nights. But he’s pretty sure the fine print would exclude present company.

He spends a long time rinsing himself of these troubling notions, lest he eventually succeed in meandering his way to the brink of hysterics. When he finally emerges, he almost expects Pete to have reneged on his end of the deal, and indeed it would be very like him to have panicked and fled back to the safety of his own miserly solitude, but Pete is sprawled on the far side of the bed, face in a pillow, bath towel still cocked around his waist, sleeping more soundly than Roger will ever manage in his life.

He makes a note to memorize this, too. _Pete in his bed, Pete jagged in the bed like a puzzle piece, Pete staying with him because he wants to and wants it just enough not to care that it’s obvious._

Roger sits down next to him, chews on his fingernail for several minutes before he summons the nerve to lie down, curl himself gingerly in the spaces of the mattress that aren’t already occupied by Pete’s limbs. Putting an arm around him doesn’t seem quite right. He rolls onto his side, facing away, superstitiously worried that if he turns and looks Pete will vanish, spell broken.

As if in response, Pete shifts and hooks Roger round the waist, pulling them together, face pressed into the dip of his shoulder, somehow a more earth-shaking intimacy than anything else that has happened between them, and Roger squeezes his eyes shut and is completely still, reduced to self-protective impulse. He exhales, long and hard to stop his chest caving in. Helplessly, automatically, he covers Pete’s arm with his own. He prays for sleep to take him, and then for the opposite, for the will to stay up all night so long as Pete will stay wrapped around him.

It won’t matter either way. The telephone rings, rattling through the air like a peal of thunder, unnaturally shrill.

Roger jerks upright, overriding the urge to rip the thing out of the wall and send it across the room. Pete flies off him, startled and rudely awoken, his eyes as big as saucers. There is a quick shock of terror between them, kneejerk recoil at the intrusion. It is the momentary but inevitable sensation that they’ve been somehow discovered. And then it hits the both of them, in a shared glance: _Keith_.

Roger, closest to the nightstand, seizes the receiver mid-ring. He has to clear his throat, and then the words tumble out, “Yeah, who is it, hello?”

“Sorry to wake you,” says the pleasant and anonymous receptionist on the other end. “I have a Bor—Boris, on the line for you? Apologies, it’s all he gave.”

“What, what’s going on?” Pete croaks, back stiff as a board, very much awake now but still stunned and only partly functional.

Roger blinks, several seconds worth of processing before he understands. “Right, put him through.”

There’s a crackle, and then John comes through in his ear.

“He’s awake, the bastard, and he won’t bloody shut up,” says John, clearly overjoyed, and nothing in his gravestone voice can disguise the fact.

Roger collapses over himself, running a hand through his hair and laughing in a surge of relief. This gets the message across to Pete, who sinks down against the headboard, hands flung up to his temples, mumbling _Oh, thank God._

“I tried Pete’s room, but he must be sacked out,” John reports. Keith can just barely be heard chattering indistinctly and happily over him. “I had to go back and stay with him, couldn’t sleep a wink anyway. Soon as I got there the nurses told me he was really coming to. I must be his lucky charm.”

“Must be,” Roger assents, tremulous through the glaze of tears in his eyes.

“It’s John, is it?” Pete is excitable now, grasping for the telephone, eager to hear the news from the source. “Give ‘er here, put him on.”

Roger clamps his hand down sternly over the mouthpiece. “He doesn’t know we’re… _together_.”

“What would be so terribly unexpected about that?” Pete says, folding his arms. “It’s not like he knows we’re together _naked_. Unless you decide to go running your mouth about it.”

“Shhh, shut it, for God’s sake,” hisses Roger, reflexively.

“Rog’,” says John. “You there, mate?”

Roger grumbles listlessly, shoves the phone into Pete’s hand as he beckons furiously. The cord stretches over them like a seatbelt. He leans his head in close to Pete’s jaw, almost nestled in the crook of his neck, so he can hear the conversation. They are mirror images leaned up against one another, legs crossed under towels, hips and shoulders pressed together.

“John, it’s me,” says Pete. “How’s he doing? Full recovery in process, I hope? I’d expect nothing less out of him, you tell him that. He’s survived worse, after all.”

“About a hundred times over, if you believe half the stories,” Roger hears John reply. “Pete. Didn’t realize you’d stopped by next door. Yeah, the nurses say he’ll be on his feet by morning, God help us all. Save us a bit of brandy, the two of you, please? Maybe a bottle of champagne’s in order—once he’s cleared to drink it.”

There’s quite a bit of hollering in response to that suggestion, deafening enough that even Roger can make out bits of phrases, including Keith’s insistence that he’s fresh as a daisy and more than well prepared for a glass. Roger can’t help but chuckle, and he can feel Pete smirking next to him, too.

“Not yet, you aren’t,” John scolds gruffly. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Should we come over?” Pete fidgets, antsy under Roger, who now has his chin propped up on his shoulder. “Rog’ and I can call a cab, help you hold down the fort. They must have him strapped down over there.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you. Right, then, get your arses over here. He’d be happy to see you both.”

“I want to see him,” murmurs Roger in agreement, and Pete reaches out to run a hand down his thigh, reassure him.

“Be right there,” Pete says.

“Dodged another bullet,” John sighs, by way of farewell. Pete hands the phone back so Roger can hang it up.

The clock on the wall reads just past 4:30 in the morning. Through a slit in the curtains, a faint whisper of blue light is creeping along the carpet, signaling dawn’s approach.

Pete clambers over the edge of the bed, pulling their scattered clothes up from the floor and tossing them on top of the duvet to sort through. Though he longs to see Keith returned to his bright-eyed and irrepressible self, Roger finds himself stricken with a cavernous sadness, stretching out as wide and deep as an empty concert hall.

Solemnly, he rises, sheds the towel on the back of a chair and pulls on his briefs and his jeans, tugs the shirt back over his head. Quickly, too quickly, Pete has done the same, is yanking a boot on one foot while hopping awkwardly on the other. Roger throws him a frail smile and winces through the jab in his skull, first pulsing barb of a burgeoning hangover.

Pete swats at his trousers, and when he comes up empty, sidles up beside Roger to dig his hands into his pockets, fish the crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his jeans. Roger nearly jumps out of his skin at the scrape of Pete’s knuckles against his backside, even through a layer of denim.

Flash of a wicked grin from Pete, who looks like he’s learned something terribly incriminating. He puts a cigarette in Roger’s mouth, then his own. A match flares sulfurous orange. Their eyes meet.

“Tonight could have ended up a lot worse,” he says, and lights each of them up.

Roger nods and takes a long drag. He searches Pete’s gaze for something definitive.

“Yeah,” he breathes out with a lungful of smoke.

“Ready to go?”

Roger nods again, grits his teeth through the inexplicable feeling of his heart crumbling to pieces beneath his ribs. Pete continues to stare through the climbing wisps of smoke, maybe a beat too long by Roger’s estimation, and then blinks it away.

They head for the door.

Roger blurts, “Wait,” before he can stop himself. Pete’s hand freezes on the knob and he looks back over his shoulder, cigarette hanging off the fulcrum of his lower lip.

He wants to pluck it straight out of his mouth, kiss Pete with an awful, insistent yearning, one last time before they open the door and are thrust back out into the real world, ejected from the sheltered, liminal Eden of the hotel room. This is the essential quality of all hotel rooms; hidden away, purged and reset at regular intervals. Pete had once regaled him with this theory, of all the spaces on tour which existed in a kind of dream outside of time. There had been a bit of wine shared out between the two of them, a pub after a gig during their early days, and Roger had listened with rapt attention. When Pete wasn’t oscillating between cleverness and cruelty, he could speak like poetry. Roger loved that about him.

Hotel rooms, dressing rooms, the confines of the touring van on long and empty stretches of freeway, hidden backstage quarters, the club before they’d set all the gear up, the club after they’d torn everything down.

 _Pete_ , Roger had pointed out, more shy and cautious at that age than he could ever be considered now, _it sounds like just about everything outside the gig itself is in a dream._

 _That’s precisely it, Roger, my dear,_ Pete had crowed, brimming with contagious delight. _The music, the performance, they’re the only thing what anchors us in reality, you see._ _Everything else is_ —and he had waved his fingers here, fluidly, for effect, in a way that made Roger laugh like a smitten schoolboy— _Everything else is just… adrift._

Roger, adrift, feels the moment pass, too late to be seized upon. Pete cants his chin down, eyebrows piqued, inquiring.

Roger goes and fetches his room key from the dresser, next to the empty bottle of wine, brandishes it at Pete for explanation. His eyes pass over the stain on the rug by the foot of the bed. It’s a paltry bit of damage by Who standards, but it’s something. Proof they were here. He hopes the staff has trouble scrubbing it out, that a faint outline will transcend them both and the endless parade of visitors to come, all the efforts to hide their tracks.

“All right,” he says, steeling himself, more resolute this time. “I’m ready.”


	3. Chapter 3

_New York, New York_

_June 10, 1974_

 

The morning after their first night at the Garden, Roger rises uncharacteristically early to a crack of sunlight streaming through the shades on the bedspread, a blinding strip across the hotel room.

Each tour is a successively nicer promenade of hotels. The Navarro is no exception. Swaddled in silk sheets and a down duvet, an egregious luxury given the summer weather, he peels off layers of bedding and pads to the window in his briefs, peering around the curtain down to the expanse of the city, spiky concrete and the great green mass of Central Park stretching out before him.

Inspired by the sight, he splashes some water on his face and scrubs his teeth, before throwing on a t-shirt and his Levi’s and racing out the door. He leaves word of his whereabouts with the front desk, and strict instructions that no one except for Bill Curbishley be granted access to this information, not even the band. Secretly, he hopes that not even Bill bothers to look.

He spills out on to the street amidst a chorus of tires and car horns and chatter. New York is a friendly town, and has always been especially friendly to them, even when The Who have least deserved it. They’ve crashed opera houses and kicked well-meaning police officers off stages, wrecked hotel rooms until the Navarro became the only respectable establishment insane enough to house them, but still are welcomed back with open arms and sold out stadiums. Roger has good reason to appreciate such merciful qualities, in people and in American cities.

It’s beautiful enough to walk, but in the interest of dodging undue attention, he hails a cab uptown to the park entrance just off the model boat pond on 72nd Street. He buys a newspaper and a coffee from a street corner vendor whose eyeballs linger a fraction too long, but who otherwise refrains from comment.

Once inside, he arranges himself on an appealingly sloping patch of greenery, the better to watch the slow trickle of residents and tourists milling around the water, some of them setting up little model yachts that are so intricately designed as to look just like their full-sized counterparts. Like real boats shrunk down by a ray gun.

Roger smiles to himself while he sips his coffee, trying not to let the events of last night grate on his mind. He imagines these thoughts as model boats, and tries to let them drift by, little ships in the breeze.

Easier said than done. Last night’s performance had been a disaster, if not by their enchanted audience’s standards then by their own, an unending barrage of technical difficulties topped off by Pete’s drunken rage, Keith and John’s already propulsive playing ratcheted up to incomprehensible speeds and fueled by cocaine and Mandrax. Pete had concluded the night’s festivities by smashing his Les Paul to bits, the first indication that all bets were off. The debacle had resulted in one of their legendary, blow-out fights backstage, a storm of blame directed anywhere and everywhere but inward, and Roger recalls with grim half-amusement that Pete had at one point resorted to pelting him with a stack of plastic beer cups, one after the other. It wasn’t a truly violent conflagration, but explosive enough to keep them all running on an undercurrent of frustration and ill will.

Roger sighs. They’ve got three more days of their residency here, three opportunities to get over it and get it right, and only a few hours with which to recover in between.

Peace on the road is but a series of stolen moments. Might as well enjoy them while they last.

He sets his coffee and paper aside and reclines on the grass, the movements of the surrounding city retreating into an ambient lullaby. Soon enough, he is drifting in and out of sleep, in tune with the rhythm of the sun passing among the clouds. It is not deeply enough to dream, but as he dozes he finds himself lazily tracing an optimistic stream of thought. Semi-conscious, he envisions a night—one night—without the chaos that so often follows in their wake. There is a thunderously roaring crowd, and amplifiers that never falter. A band in perfect alignment with itself, as if by magic. Perhaps the precise vintage of red wine Roger prefers awaiting backstage.

Fleetingly, the impression of Pete smiling instead of scowling. It is the stuff of miracles, really. A desperate prayer.

And it is answered, in a way. Not in the way he had hoped, to be sure, but Roger is very much accustomed to conditional gains. He hears boots crunching up the park grass, at intervals suggesting a familiar loping gait. He resists the urge to open his eyes until the boots come to a stop beside him, a long shadow canting over his face and blocking out the sun.

“I suppose the luxury hotel mattress was not up to your exacting standards,” says Pete, with customarily guarded levity, hovering over him in judgment. “You know, if you prefer sleeping in the dirt, I believe my mother is still in possession of the old touring van. And there’s always a Motel Six. Cheaper, too.”

Roger blinks up at him. “How did you find me?”

“Well, I thought to myself, ‘What would our rugged outdoorsman of a singer do,’ our model of self-discipline, were he to arise bright and early sans hangover, unlike the rest of us indulgent sods. Naturally I deduced that he would make a beeline for the nearest spot of greenery, and Central Park being both the closest _and_ the largest—”

Roger can’t help his face starting to crack in amusement. “You bribed the front desk.”

“Pitifully easy, really. Didn’t even have to take out my wallet. Turns out, all you need’s a marker and a scrap of paper and a bloke with a niece who loves you.”

“Guess I’ll choose to be flattered you came looking for me.” Roger sits up, rubbing his eyes. Pete’s still stood above him with his arms crossed, in his off-duty uniform of blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. He looks misplaced in the summer sun, pale and sullen, the bright light casting the hollows of his face in that much starker relief. “What time is it?”

“Noon, almost.” Pete glances around frantically, like he’s remembered a crucial piece of information. “Which reminds me—they’ll be out and about now.”

Roger raises an eyebrow. “‘They’? Who’s ‘they’?”

“Stay right here,” Pete commands, not to be disobeyed. “Back in an instant.”

Pete makes a sudden break over and behind him, and Roger, still shaking off the dregs of sleep, drapes over his knees with an exasperated groan.

The truth is, he’s almost excited that Pete has decided to track him down, since being stalked and scolded for dozing in the park grass is really Pete’s sideways approach to an apology, even if Pete himself would never deign to admit it. Roger has been functioning as the man’s interpreter for close to a decade, within the songs and otherwise. It’s not the sort of thing they make a handbook for, but Roger’s as stubborn as he is diligent, and doesn’t give up easy. He’s got more of Pete figured out than he lets on. Pete probably wouldn’t want to admit that, either.

And Roger, for his role in the game, pretends he hasn’t forgiven Pete since the moment he saw his face. Which he assumes is a useless act, partly because he has an awfully telling smile—which Pete has called him on before, and isn’t that a thrill, the thought of him analyzing such a thing—but mostly because Pete has the unsettling ability to see through people like glass.

Over his shoulder, Roger glimpses him returning with a cone of soft serve ice cream in each hand, a sight that strikes him as so unexpected and ridiculous that he has to hide his grin behind his arm. Pete drops heavily beside him, and Roger gathers himself just in time to accept the cone being offered him.

“Is this an olive branch?” he asks.

“Well, no, actually, it’s ice cream.”

Roger laughs, another terribly guileless expression of his which is prone to betraying him. It’s worth it to see Pete so pleased by it.

“I’ll take what I can get,” he says, but it’s good. The ice cream is good. Sitting next to Pete Townshend on a summer afternoon, when Pete isn’t drunk and raving or threatening to kill him, is effortlessly good.

Roger glances over at him and sees Pete has got a smear of vanilla at the corner of his mouth. Automatically, he reaches out to smudge it away with his thumb. Thankfully he catches himself before sucking it off. Pete looks at him like he’s just been slapped.

“Sorry,” Roger mutters, and looks away.

It’s not as though he had expected a conversation following the events of last November, that either of them would have stood to gain anything from trying to talk about what happened in the San Francisco hotel room with the ugly bedspread and the wine-stained rug. What good could possibly come of it? Another raucous quarrel, at best, and with the stakes so high, perhaps even a fracture too catastrophic to heal. The thought of that possibility makes him ill, and so Roger tries to write the episode off as one of Pete’s wild stunts, an experimental and unusually underhanded tactic in their long-running war of sorts. Roger won’t give him the satisfaction of dwelling on it, even though he wakes in the middle of the night sometimes from dreamed recollections of Pete’s hands scraping down his torso, rough calloused fingertips down the grooves of his chest, in such harrowing fidelity it makes him sweat.

And then he will feel Pete’s eyes pinning him down in studio booths and backstage corners, a sly and heavy-lidded gaze, the kind that pierces deep and sticks far too long. Pete has an unsettling stare by anyone’s metric, but this is different. It’s enough to throw Roger’s whole theory into question.

He’s pretty sure he feels Pete looking at him that way now.

As they finish their ice cream in stiff, cautious silence, a group of tourists down the hill by the boat pond notice them and begin to gawk and point. Roger, obliging, waves cheerfully. Pete flips them the bird.

Roger grabs the newspaper by his side and swats Pete with it, admonishing. “Can’t bring you anywhere.”

“Give me that,” Pete growls, wresting it away from him, face contorted into a caricature of indignation. “I brought myself here, thank you very much. If those googly-eyed twats can recognize us they should know well enough what to expect.”

“I’m not sure what I expected,” says Roger flatly.

Pete wrinkles his nose as he unfolds the newspaper, examining the front page. “This is yesterday’s, Roger, you bought yesterday’s paper. I shouldn’t be surprised you managed.”

“The fellow behind the counter seemed a bit distracted.”

“Right, you’re very distracting. Distracting enough that we now have an audience.” Pete gestures dismissively at the tourists and sets the previous evening’s edition of the New York Times on his lap. He flips through the pages with rabid determination, until he lands on the section devoted to local entertainment, and cries out brightly. “Ah, I thought this was the one. Yes! Bill had warned me not to read it, not until after. Here it is.”

“What, what is it?” Roger leans over to sneak a glimpse, and Pete recoils protectively away, insistent upon reading the specimen aloud himself.

“’And so, Madison Square Garden is preparing for trouble,’” declares Pete, in a grave newscaster’s register, mouth wrinkled in poor concealment of a smirk. “’On one of these evenings, an adult—but not an adolescent—who sees the Who for the first time might have difficulty comprehending the hysteria stimulated by these four men between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty.’”

Roger, wide-eyed, makes a grab for the paper, and Pete wheels away again, continuing in a higher, more emphatic pitch.

“’He will see dour guitarist Pete Townshend, angel-faced lead singer Roger Dalt—’ Ha! Angel-faced, what an absolutely delightful bit of copy. Spelled your name wrong, though. Wonder if that merits a correction.” He shoots Roger a purposeful glance, enough to make Roger’s cheeks run briefly hot. “—'Lead singer Roger Daltrey, perpetually grinning drummer Keith Moon and immobile John Entwistle, all engaged in rowdy and violent rock theatrics.’”

“What is this? Who wrote this?”

“A journalist who rightfully assumes we’re all a bunch of degenerate yobbos.” Pete pauses while he scans further down the page, glee dissipating into a frown. “’The violence of this musical technique—better called a choreographed temper tantrum—is literally pounded home in blasting volume, loud even by rock’s standards. Conventional melodies, traditional rock harmonies and even the rock beat are obliterated. In fact, music itself disappears. What remains is a roar.’”

“A temper tantrum worth twenty-thousand tickets four nights over,” Roger adds, crossly. “What a stupid thing to say about us.”

Pete pitches backward, keeling over into the grass behind him, flinging the newsprint dramatically over his head in despair. Roger isn’t completely past the sight of him collapsing over like a ragdoll, and leans hurriedly over his torso, peeling disheveled papers away from his face, quick check for consciousness. Pete stares back up at him, flinty-eyed and observant as ever. Resentfully, Roger banishes the surge of fear that had come over him.

“We’re finished, Rog’,” says Pete, wistfully. “A cabaret act. Slapstick comedy. And the distinguished columnists at the New York Times are pissing on our grave.”

Roger _hates_ it when he talks like this, hates these episodes of self-flagellating reverie even more than he hates Pete drunk and belligerent. It drives him mad, how he could have so little faith in everything they’ve built together, all that they’ve suffered through and fought tooth and nail to become.

Four sold out nights at the world’s most famous arena has got to count for something, even if Pete’s neurosis won’t permit him to see such things objectively. They’ve endured far worse over the course of a decade than the half-baked recriminations of some pompous writer who wouldn’t understand rock ‘n’ roll if it bashed him straight over the skull with a guitar.

“I don’t know why you bother listening to this drivel,” says Roger, while Pete studies him from below. “It’s not like you listen to anybody else.”

“I listen plenty. Just because I don’t always do what _you_ want me to doesn’t mean I don’t listen.”

Roger chews the inside of his cheek to forestall a useless retort, and Pete lets them hang there long enough to dredge up a familiar charge, the configuration of their bodies once again spring-loaded in the direction of a suggestive resolution. Roger feels the sun beating down on his back like a flame burning down a fuse.

“Rog’,” says Pete, pensively now, “what the hell are we doing? What are we supposed to be?”

Roger opens his mouth to respond but can’t force a word out until he realizes Pete is talking about the band, not the two of them.

“We are,” he recovers, interrupted by a long exhale, “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll group in the world.”

Pete starts to laugh, not necessarily unkindly, but like he’s grasped the punchline to a joke several moments ahead of anyone else.

“Right, very funny. Hilarious.” Roger sways out from over him, relieving himself of the oppressive burden of Pete’s scrutiny. “It’s true, and you know it. If it weren’t you would have left long ago, seeing as how we make you so bloody miserable.”

Pete’s fiendish grin falters immediately, and he stills on the ground.

“You don’t make me miserable.”

“That’s a load of bollocks.”

Now Pete whacks him with a remnant of newspaper. Roger bristles, spins round and glowers at him, but Pete can see it’s an empty threat, and smiles again, half-unhinged.

“ _You_ don’t make me miserable,” Pete repeats, emphasis deliberate. “Because that’s what this is about, right? You and me.”

Roger’s breath catches in his throat. Well, here they are, then.

“I didn’t--" he manages that part, but isn’t quite sure where he intends to go with the rest.

“You didn’t, but that’s the gist of all this, isn’t it?” Pete nudges Roger’s elbow with a bent knee, an affectionate provocation. And then, for good measure, adds: “Angel-face.”

Roger groans, but there’s no spine to it. He looks back out over the idyllic tranquil of Central Park in the summertime, the expanses of sunlit lawn and glassy gray-brown of the boat pond, all surrounded by the towering shell of the city. It gives him an illusory sense of being shielded, the nerve to speak plainly.

“I figured it would change something, that it had to,” he starts, after a long and heavy silence, and then, realizing the absurdity of the idea, crumples into a bruised sort of laugh. “Fool that I was.”

When he blinks to clear his head, it invites the bracing recollection of Pete’s hand reaching out to cup his face, pull them together. He shakes it off.

“And for a while I was afraid of that, you know. Because it couldn’t possibly end up all right for two awful bastards like us. Why should it? What we did, the aftermath of that, it could only go one way.”

Pete scowls. “You think I’d do that, bust the band up over it? Go wash your mouth out.” It comes out an injured sneer, and Pete nudges him again, almost plaintively, though Roger refuses to turn and look at him again, not yet.

“But then I was actually stupid enough to hope it would change things for the better.” Roger rubs at the back of his neck, a fair bit more wounded by this admission than he had planned for. “I held on to that for a bit, too. Longer than I should have, I know.”

He floors the brakes on his idiot mouth before he can go on and say, _and the hope that it might happen again_ , because that’s just too much, too far gone, and why doesn’t he break open his ribs right there and serve Pete his heart on a platter, pitiful white flag sticking out of it like a fork.

He can feel Pete’s eyes boring into the back of his skull. He finally twists round to meet them, ready to have the breath knocked out of his lungs by the sight, because Pete has been too dreadfully quiet, and at this point in his life Roger has learned there’s nothing more ominous than Pete Townshend silently staring with the gears turning in his head.

Pete says, “I could kiss you,” as if it were a passing thought he might casually remark upon, and somehow that is a thousand times worse than any other way Roger could have imagined him answering.

“Better not,” he replies, sullenly. “In case we still have our audience.”

Without warning, Pete bolts upright at the waist, hooks an arm around Roger’s neck, and pulls him in roughly, planting an exaggerated kiss that is intended for his cheek but lands somewhere between his eye socket and his nose. And then releases him.

“ _Aaagh_ ,” says Roger, wiping at the point of impact with his shirt sleeve, and glares at him, red-faced and ablaze in mortified anger. It was a pantomime kiss, nothing that could be confused for anything, but it stings like a mockery, Pete undermining the seriousness of the situation. It would have been almost preferable if Pete had just kissed him on the mouth, right there in the middle of the park for half the city to witness.

The flare of his temper is short-lived. Roger decides to capitalize on the dare, and finds Pete’s hand under the cover of the grass, lacing their fingers together. The look of startled bemusement on Pete’s face is worth the world.

“So _there_ ,” Roger tells him, unsure if he intends it as a joke.

Pete says, “All right,” and surrenders a small laugh. He doesn’t pull away. For once, he lets Roger win.

They observe the little boats bobbing on the pond, throngs of happy families passing up and down the blacktop paths, warmed by the sunlight. It feels as though there are a thousand pairs of eyes on them, and none at all. People watching, as Pete was fond of remarking, without really seeing.

“Nothing will ever change us, Roger,” he continues suddenly, in a stone-faced and self-assured turn, as though he were explaining some fundamental law of the universe. “That brings me great solace, and if you don’t understand why that is I hope you’ll come round one day.”

Roger elects not to ask for clarification, and there’s something sweetly encouraging in the way Pete says it anyway, a buried meaning he figures he’ll uncover when he’s ready. He runs his thumb over Pete’s knuckles, battered and scabbed, small knots of old gashes in varying progressions of scarring. There’s a plaster over one finger where the nail got caught on a guitar string, ripped off by a vicious swing. Roger’s never questioned the bloodshed, or how Pete plays through the pain. Its necessity is self-evident. And the wounds always heal.

“What about this place?” Roger swipes an open palm out, perhaps indicating the scene before them, or maybe the whole of the city. “Does this qualify as a dream, by your account? Is it real?”

Pete squints at him, or maybe it’s just the sun in his eyes. He seems pleasantly surprised by this line of inquiry.

“Funny you should ask,” he says, cheerfully. “You know, I can’t really say for sure.”

Roger nods. He can’t either.

“I think we’re due back at the Garden soon. Soundcheck at two.”

“Mm.”

“It will be better this time,” he adds. It’s too beautiful a day to waste on anything but good cheer. Dogged, stupid faith that everything will turn out all right. He stands, brushing the bits of grass of his lap, extending his arm down to Pete to haul him up.

“Well,” Roger says. “Are you ready?”

Pete smiles, steadfast.

He takes Roger’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Structured along a series of historical events which actually happened, including Pete's assault on Roger with a guitar at Shepperton Studios, Keith Moon's collapse at the Cow Palace, and the four sold-out Madison Square Garden shows in 1974. The New York Times article is real. [You can read it here.](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/06/09/archives/musical-punkism-or-the-what-where-and-why-of-the-who-the-who-s.html)
> 
> I'm certain I need not tell you which parts did not actually happen.


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